Ivan E Moore has pulled the plug on the KDE Linux Packaging Project. On his page he explains the reasons, citing a lack of time and the fact that he received little help from the community, along with "one person".

<rant>
This happened with freshmeat.net a while ago, it has happened to countless projects, and I'm *tired* of dumbasses flaming developers/packagers/webmasters/whatever who volunteer their time to OpenSource projects. Stop bitching and fix it. The full text of the notice is below. Note: He says he is still maintaining the kde2 packages for Debian Woody.
</rant>

"I've decided to kill the KLPP and my packaging of anything other than the Debian woody version of KDE 2.0. The reason is due to 1 person. I know you are saying..but it's just one person. Well...I volunteer my
time and one person getting stressing me out because I don't do enough to make his life easier is one person too many. I started the KLPP to help others out. I figured since I'm doing alot of this for my wife I'll throw it up
for others to benefit. Well, aparantly this dumbass believes that isn't what I started the KLPP for. His belief is that I voluntered to take care of all KDE packaging for Debian and if I can't do it myself, to find someone who
can.

Well, I have to say this is the one drawback to an opensource volunteer world. The fact that people are used to being able to expect a level of perfection from the people producing things they use. We created a
lazy world and you can't be lazy in the opensource world. You have to be willing to take imperfection and either live with it or take an active role to make it better.

I'm just tired of this. I have so much on my plate right now with the packaging of KDE 2.0 for Debian woody and the other packages I maintain. And that's just my Debian duties. And don't take this as an
opportunity to say that I'm whining or trying to put a guilt trip on anyone. Screw that. I have taken these tasks on as my responsibility. For these tasks I will go out of my way to make sure they are done. The KLPP I
never made such an agreement. Next to nobody has stepped forward to help...I know there are tons of people using the resulting packages...but no one packaging anything.

For this I say goodbye on this plane. I'll leave the files up for at least a week. And maybe once KDE 2.0 is officially released and I get the woody stuff worked out I might build some potato packages for you all."

I've found Silvio Schürer's SuSE KDE2 RPM page at http://www.keywarrior.net/silvio/kde2/index.en.html
This is another mighty packaging effort. It looks like it has been superseded by the SuSE RPMs on ftp://ftp.kde.org but it contains a gem of documentation which I have been asking for for about a month - the instructions on how to install the SuSE RPMs. This level of detail was missing from the SuSE README file. The instructions may now be out of date, but at least I now know that they existed, including the step which says "first install ALSA".
Thank you, Silvio!!!!
Now if you or someone could just update this doco and copy it to the KDE and SuSE web sites, ready for the release of KDE 2.0, there would be fewer SuSE users with installation problems.

1) A lot of people cannot compile themselves
2) If everybody should compile the mailinglists would not be 200 mails a day, but perhaps 2000++ mails a day with people asking the same questions or reporting the same bugs.

So the packer is doing a favour to the community like the coder or the people writing the documentation.

One could take your argument further, and say why code? Why not let everybody out there make its own software for him/herself? That would not make sense either...

I'm not using KDE, but I imagine that it must be a lot of work to put the packages together.

I'm a 'baby newbie' at this point. All I really know is how to successfully load 'Redhat Linux' 5 times out of 6 on average, and not much more. What concerns me here is attitude. There is a "problem" in the Open Linux community over this situation with Ivan. If there never are 'problems'in a creative situation, it wouldn't be creative. Naturally in the universe, the appearance of destructiveness during a creative cycle takes place - with people too. I'm just starting this adventure in the Linux Universe. I'm having to constantly remind myself to relax and enjoy, even the tough moments. I'm glad to be part of the creative universe of Linux.

Ivan: Your experience and your reaction to it sounds right on to me. The Open Source community needs to take a hard look at its ugly, selfish underbelly, understand its limits, and grow up. At it's worst, it is an egotistical, self defeating mob of leaderless, egotistical jackasses who are hurting an otherwise noble endeavour. Cf. Lord of the Flies, boyz. Eric Raymond's "gifting culture" is bullshit.

I just read others' comments to Ivan and am very impressed by the healthy generosity and genuine appreciation directed toward him. I hope my remarks are not misunderstood. For they appear to paint all members of the Open Source community with the same negative brush. To do so is inaccurate and unjust. I am trying to express the idea (as one of the posters put it so well) that the whiners should either get to work or (to paraphrase) "go back to MS Windows." I will add, however, that others seeing this "one individual" drive a good person over the edge should probably have been more forcefull in their defense of his efforts and in their condemnation of that lone, misguided individual. I may be off base on this and if I am, please accept my apology, but I bet not many spoke up in Ivan's defense while the flaming was going on. (This was one flame war I missed, thank you.) In my experience, most are afraid to stand on a principle, afraid to take a leadership role, afraid to get involved in a heated argument. They sit passively by as a few people flame the shorts off of one another. Often, the flammers are all jerks, but in this case Ivan clearly was not and his attacker was. Again, I don't know if such "High Noon" passivity was the case here, but I bet it was. If you see a good person getting stomped, it's your job to jump in and put an end to it without a lot of howdy-do's and oops, you go before me's. Timidity is a greater danger to the Open Source movement than the odd wrong headed, arrogant S.O.B. Respectfully, Dennis Eberl, Founder of BFLUG, ( http://www.bflug.org ).

You really don't know what you're talking about. This wasn't some public flame war. I had just vented my frustration with KDE and Debian with Ivan in private and it just happened to be that I was the straw that broke the camel's back. I *have* apologized to Ivan since that has happened and he seems to be taking care of things very well. Haven't you noticed that Ivan wasn't the only one at the KLPP? Yet apparently he was the only one who was active. And haven't you noticed that the site hadn't been updated much anyway?

Dear Ivan, I'm only a spanish student of Computer Science. Initially I used Linux because it is the de-facto OS in my faculty (Debian dist). In the faculty we used the FVWM window manager but this wm is horrible for Windows & Mac users (and for not too). Then, I decided to install, in my PC, KDE 1.1.2 and I was in the heaven: a nice GUI very intuitive with well-integrated apps. In addition, my faculty has decided this year to install the Potato release with the KDE desktop as the default window manager, and now, in this moment I'm downloading the KDE 2.0 packages THANKS TO YOU, IVAN. I've been waiting this moment anxious.
There are MANY people that love your work (me too).
From here, I want to encourage you to keep alive the KLPP project. I would like to help you, but I'm very newbie in this fantastic and complex world, although if the task is very simple I will be available for you.

Hey listen I know it makes you angry for one person who talks out of his ass. But still there are a lot of people like me who switch from windoze to linx and we know all the hard work that you and others put in on something on your own time. So here is a person that would like to say thank you for all your hard work. Just don't let one horse persude you from doing something you want to do